Re: [PATCH 0/3] cpufreq: Replace timers with utilization update callbacks

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 10:52:20AM -0800, Steve Muckle wrote:
> On 02/11/2016 09:30 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> >> My concern above is that pokes are guaranteed to keep occurring when
> >> > there is only RT or DL activity so nothing breaks.
> >
> > The hook in their respective tick handler should ensure stuff is called
> > sporadically and isn't stalled.
> 
> But that's only true if the RT/DL tasks happen to be running when the
> tick arrives right?
> 
> Couldn't we have RT/DL activity which doesn't overlap with the tick? And
> if no CFS tasks happen to be executing on that CPU, we'll never trigger
> the cpufreq update. This could go on for an arbitrarily long time
> depending on the periodicity of the work.

Possible yes, but why do we care? Such a CPU would be so much idle that
cpufreq doesn't matter one way or another, right?